Distribution centers often include material handling systems comprised of various pieces of material handling equipment including a collection of one or more conveyors, carts, picking systems, put walls, and scanners, to move inventory items and/or assist employees in moving inventory items to fill customer orders. One piece of material handling equipment that is growing in use in distribution centers is the put wall. A put wall enables items to be consolidated into a common location, such as a cubby. By assigning all items for an order to the same cubby, the items may be grouped together for further processing, such as for packing into a single box for shipment.
In current distribution centers, orders are often received and grouped together in batches or waves. In current material handling systems, when a put wall is used to consolidate items for orders, a cubby of the put wall for each order of the batch or wave is assigned at a time prior to items for the order being picked, such as at the time the batch or wave is generated or released. Because each order is pre-assigned a cubby of the put wall, the number of orders in a batch or wave is constrained by the number of cubbies of the put wall in current material handling systems. Thus, current material handling systems employing put walls require additional physical infrastructure changes, such as the addition of put wall cubbies, to increase batch or wave size support capabilities. Additionally, because each order is pre-assigned a cubby of the put wall, cubbies are not reused within a batch or wave in current material handling systems. Thus, current material handling systems employing put walls can force employees working at the put wall to travel to less ergonomic or inefficient cubbies during the processing of a wave or batch.